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Wednesday, February 10, 2016

I planned on writing a little bit about the efforts of CSM Watch's coverage of this year's CSM election now that the deadline for applying is over. Perhaps tomorrow or Friday. I have RMT news to cover.

For those unaware of the latest news in EVE Online, CCP released a patch yesterday that included the new skill point trading mechanics. I do not have data from Tuesday, but apparently everyone and their brother decided to buy skill injectors. Of course, skill injectors are rather expensive, costing a little more than half a PLEX each. I guess that explains why in the first 6 hours of today 3,098 PLEX were sold in Jita.

Why is that figure for the amount of PLEX sold so amazing? Because before this week, the most PLEX ever sold in a single day in The Forge, the home region of New Eden's largest trade hub, was 6,161. Based on the start of today, I expect, once yesterday's totals appear either in the market interface or on the CREST API feed, that the record recorded on 1 November 2013 shattered into a billion pieces.

Now, to bring up an interesting factoid about the PLEX record. The record was set when an EVE gambling site, SOMERblink, conducted a liquidation sale in response to CCP closing the loophole that allowed the gambling site's operator to launder at least $150,000 in ISK during a 3 year period.

Why bring up illicit RMT? Because business is very good for the ISK sellers. The sales volumes at Player Auctions, the illicit RMT site I monitor, are at an unprecedented level, at least in my experience. So far in the first nine days of February, I tracked over 780 billion ISK sold, with over 220 billion ISK in sales yesterday. That is a lot of skill injectors.

Once I get more figures, I will write a comprehensive blog post. But for now, just remember that players aren't the only ones excited about the new skill injectors. I will make a prediction. Expect to see a ban wave sometime before Fanfest. With this much dirty ISK moving around, I believe quite a few people will receive a polite letter from CCP Peligro informing them that they won a vacation from EVE Online for a week. Or perhaps, even permanently.